Fleeting Grace
by xoxo.Starless.Skies.xoxo
Summary: Grace Hale doesn't live a fairytale life by anyone's definition-her noticable lack of money and her undefined parentage guarantee it-but when she's in a car crash, she learns a new secret that threatens everything she knows and loves. Inspired by S.D.
1. Family that Bonds, Family that Breaks

**A/N: Hey guys...umm this is my first fanfic so if you guys could be generous on the reviews, that'd be great, but you totally don't have to if you don't want to...**

**thanks to my first reviewer, Xx Hidden Secret xX, and my best friend xoxoGossipGirl...u kno who u are chickadee.**

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Chapter 1

December 21-25, 2007

_"What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from." --T. S. Eliot_

"Grace, honey, come on!" My mother called from the kitchen. I was kneeling on my bed in the room I shared with my eight-year-old sister, rummaging through one of my drawers. The space in the room was so limited that the space between my bed and my dresser was one and a half feet, so that if I wanted something out of my dresser, than I had to kneel on the edge of my bed and open the drawers, then go through my clothing. It was kind of annoying to live in a space that small while sharing it with a sister who was five years younger than me, but I wasn't going to complain: my mother's bedroom was half the size of mine and Maddie's, and even though we'd offered to give Mom our bedroom before, she'd explained that if our room was her room, than I would have to sleep on the couch in the living room, because her room could barely fit a single dresser and a twin-size bed. There was no way that two girls were going to be able to live there. My mother could barely live there, alone.

"I'm coming," I told her, grinning in spite of myself. Mom, Maddie and I were going Christmas shopping in New York City, and even though we were cutting it a little close to the holiday itself this year, it was a highly anticipated event in my household. Since Maddie and I didn't have a father, as far as we knew, and since Mom was an only child and both of her parents were dead, Mom got really excited about the whole concept of family togetherness, due to our general lack of it, and nothing says 'family togetherness' like Christmas shopping. 

Also…it was just kind of a tradition. Even with the noticable lack of money in my household, we each saved all year to buy each other Christmas presents.

Of course, calling it 'Christmas' shopping was a bit of the stretch of the word Christmas. Mom, Maddie and I had no specified religion, even though our mom had been raised Catholic. Mom had never really believed in the Catholic religion, but her father was a minister, and that sort of required that she go to church every Sunday and a Catholic school, complete with nuns as teachers. You'd think that some of that would rub off on her, but Mom had something against the Catholic faith, because I'd never been in a church once in my entire life. Even for Mom's parents' funeral: it'd been at a funeral home. A priest had been there, but Mom had only arranged that because she'd known that would have been what her father wanted, had he been able to make that sort of decision.

"Mommy, can we go to American Girl?" I heard my sister ask, and I tried to repress my grin as I found the sweatshirt I'd been looking for and jumped down off my bed and into the three-foot space between Maddie's and my bed. Even if I was forced to spend hours in American Girl, I would have fun today. Every year we did this, and every year I wished we could do it every day.

I shoved my feet into my sneakers and slipped out the door and into the hallway to stand with my sister and mother.

Mom had caramel blonde hair with some brown streaks that was back in a ponytail. She had a heart shaped face that was inexplicably sweet, but her electric-shock-green eyes showed that she wasn't stupid or gullible, as several sweet people were. She was five feet, seven inches tall, and was permanently tanned and extremely thin, a gene she had passed on to Maddie and me: we had ridiculously high metabolisms, which explained our thin arms and legs.

Maddie looked a lot like Mom in hair color and metabolism, but she was different in other ways: her face was longer, thinner, and she was average height for a eight-year-old girl—maybe four feet, two inches tall. Her eyes changed color from day to day, within the basic range of blue: they could be a piercing, icy blue, or such a dark blue that it took you a moment to realize that they weren't actually black. Today, her eyes were indigo, a very _provocative_ color, as my mother liked to say, a color that made you think that there was something more beneath the surface with Maddie, like maybe she was a child prodigy or something. As if.

"We're going Christmas shopping, we're going Christmas shopping, we're going Christmas shopping," Maddie sang as she skipped down the hallway towards the front door, her braids bouncing. I sighed. Although her eyes might have made you think so, there wasn't a whole lot beneath the surface with Maddie. There wasn't a whole lot _on_ the surface with her, either.

Don't get me wrong. I loved Maddie to death. But she could barely remember her own birthday, much less words and numbers: Maddie was falling increasingly behind in school. She could barely read, and her teachers were throwing around words like 'dyslexia' and 'attention deficit hyper activity disorder'. Mom and I knew what the real problem was though: Maddie just didn't care. She didn't want to learn how to read. If she did, than she'd do better, because she was an intelligent girl. But she didn't. So Mom had to deal with a constant onslaught of parent-teacher conferences and meetings with the school 'learning specialist', which was another way of saying the woman that parents talked to when the school wanted the child gone, because my little sister was lowering the school scores. And that, in turn, put more pressure on _me_ to do well, so that we could play that card where we said 'fine, but if Maddie's leaving, so is Gracie,' and that would be the end of the conversation. We went to a fabulous public school, the kind that came complete with waiting lists and extra grants from the school board because they had the best students, and if the school didn't want you there, mostly they got you kicked out for one thing or another.

"What do you want for Christmas?" Mom asked me suddenly as we followed Maddie out the door and to the car.

"What?" I asked, surprised. Christmas for me really just represented the day we went into the city and shopped for each other, rather than the twenty-fifth of December itself. Also, I tended to try to keep my want of things to a minimum: there was never enough money to buy any of the things I wanted, or the things I wanted weren't necessarily worth money. For example, I wanted to know who and where my father was. But he could have been the man in the moon, for all I knew about him.

"I know what Maddie wants for Christmas." She continued, forcing me out of my drifting mind. "But you, Gracie, have yet to make it clear what you want." She looked at me, and I shrugged uncomfortably, trying to think of something inexpensive that I wanted for Christmas. I couldn't just come out and say something expensive—it would be completely insensitive because Mom felt really guilty about the lack of money. But I also couldn't say something I completely hated, because then she'd get it for me and I'd be stuck with a present that I thought was stupid.

"Umm…maybe…a…" I struggled for something, and Mom laughed quietly, maybe even a little bitterly. I was surprised.

"Gracie wants a cell phone." Maddie said from the car, and I glared at her through the window. "And a video iPod. And a digital camera. And a computer. And—"

"Shush." I ordered, opening the door to the car and putting my hand over her mouth. She grinned evilly at me, and I rolled my eyes. This is what I meant by saying she was a smart kid: she always knew the exact wrong thing to say at any moment. But in order to do everything wrong, you have to know all the right answers, _than_ avoid them, so really, Maddie was pretty smart. If you thought about it that way. "Mads, come on. I don't want _all_ of that stuff…" My voice trailed off as I slammed the car door shut with one hand, then scrutinized my sister before releasing, making sure she wasn't going to say anything more.

"Gracie, its okay to want things you can't afford." Mom said, but her voice was a little defensive as she got in the front seat.

"I know…but I also know that it's not possible for me to get a single one of those things." I informed her, and Mom sighed in exasperation, and she started the car. We pulled out of the driveway and drove down the street before turning onto the main street of Troy, New York, our hometown.

Then I had a thought. "Unless…you could _tell_ me something, for a present." I suggested, and Mom smiled wryly at me in the mirror.

"Exactly what was it that you want to know?" Mom asked. I smiled angelically at her in the rearview mirror, and her face grew suspicious.

"The question 'who's our father' comes to mind." I told her, and Mom sighed in exasperation again.

"Honey, we've been over this. It's not about who your father is. It's about who _you_ are." She told me, and I rolled my eyes; I'd had this moral-filled, confidence-boosting speech a million times before, and I was hardly eager to repeat it.

"I know, Mom. But seriously. I'm begging you. You can spend all the Christmas money on Maddie if you tell me," I pled, and Maddie grinned.

"Come on, Mom!" Maddie said, suddenly eager to help me. I rolled my eyes at my little sister's selfishness, but accepted the help all the same; I really wanted to know.

"Girls, really. It's not important." Mom insisted.

"If it's not important to you, and it _is_ important to us, than you should tell us," I persisted. Maddie nodded enthusiastically in agreement.

"Your father's name is Scott Hale." Mom said finally, annoyance putting an angry twang in her voice. I froze, surprised that I'd actually gotten an answer. Maddie stopped nodding and froze as well, her indigo eyes wide.

"Scott Hale?" I asked in a shaky voice. "Really?" I frowned and blinked twice, trying to recover from the shock. Maddie and I had pushed this point many times before, but we'd never gotten as far as a name before. We'd never gotten as far as _anything_ before.

"Yes. Scott Hale." Mom said shortly. "He lives in Ruby Falls, Virginia, and he's your father." I blinked again, surprised.

"Scott Hale." I said again, trying the name out. "How old is he? What does he do? Why'd you leave him? Or did he leave you?" My torrent of questions caused her to look back at me with recognizable but I thought unreasonable anger, and as she did, I saw the traffic light in front of her turn red in the blink of an eye. "Wait, Mom!" I cried, pointing at the light quickly.

Everything seemed to go in slow motion.

Mom turned around, her hair flying, and she slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel wildly, trying to stop us from moving any farther, but the car was already spinning on a thin layer of ice, the result of snow melting and refreezing. Maddie and I were screaming at the top of our lungs—as if that would help anything—and I grabbed the seat in a desperate attempt to stay unhurt, and flung my other arm out, holding my sister to the seat like a seatbelt would have, had we remembered to put them on. But even as the SUV that was crossing the intersection crashed into the hood of our car, I knew it was impossible, because my head jerked forward, hit the back of the driver's seat. I was out cold before I could remember to close my eyes.

* * *

My return to consciousness was heralded by a cold breeze. I shivered a little and winced in pain. I opened my eyes and found myself staring at a white ceiling. I lifted my head a little and winced again: my entire body seemed to be bruised. I was in a hospital room, I realized, in a hospital gown the color of Pepto-Bismol. I felt that uncertain kind of fear bloom in my stomach, and I tried to take a deep breath, but my ribs protested as I struggled to sit up at the same time. I guessed that a few of them were bruised.

I had a cast on my left arm, and I had stitches on my cheek, but that was pretty much the extent of my major injuries. I had a serious headache though, and I felt a little dizzy. An IV drip was taped to the back of my hand, and I had a tube taped under my nose. I followed the tube with my eyes: it was connected to one of the three machines around my bed.

"Hey Honey," A nurse stood in the doorway, and I turned my head to stare at her, my eyes wide. She smiled reassuringly at me, and I blinked, trying to figure out what was going on.

"Where am I?" I asked. The nurse—a young, African-American woman who was about six feet tall—came over, flipping through papers on my chart. "What day is it?"

"You're in Mount Sinai Hospital," She said. "In New York City. And it's Christmas." She smiled half-heartedly at me, and I blinked. "Merry Christmas."

"It's been four days?" I murmured after a moment, trying to think through the morphine and adrenaline creating a haze on my mind. Four days. I'd been out of it for four days? It had been the twenty first, the last day I remembered. And the other days, the ones I didn't remember, weren't missing from my memory like how people generally forgot things. There was absolutely _no_ memory from the past four days. What had happened to me? Why couldn't I remember.

"Where's my Mom? And my sister?" I frowned, not responding to her holiday cheer. "What happened?" The nurse looked mildly concerned at the last question, almost as concerned as I was.

"You were in a car accident, sweet heart." She glanced at one of the monitors around me. "In Troy, New York. But your mother, sister and you were airlifted here once they got you out of the car." She avoided my gaze, and I felt that uncertain fear become more defined.

"Where are they?" I asked.

"Your sister is right next door." She said, still avoiding my gaze. I frowned; she hadn't answered my entire question.

"Where's Mom?" I asked softly, my voice making it clear that I was particularly vulnerable. The nurse shook her head infinitesimally, and I felt panic bloom in my throat, making it difficult to breathe.

"Your sister is fine for the most part, we just airlifted her here because she's so young and you and your mother were being airlifted, so she would have been all alone in the Troy hospital." She continued. "You were airlifted because you had a closed head injury, and we didn't know how severe it was, and your blood pressure was much too high." She said.

"Why was Mom airlifted?" I asked. "Where is she?" the nurse became silent, and remained that way. I sighed, and scrutinized her, trying to figure out whether I was ever going to get an answer out of her. "Is Mom…?" I felt tears jump to my eyes. "Is Mom dead?" My voice was a hoarse whisper.

"I'm so sorry," She murmured. "Grace, really. I'm incredibly sorry." I think I literally froze, then. My muscles became taut; my eyes were permanently fixated on the nurse. My heart, surprisingly enough, continued pumping steadily, according to the quietly beeping machine in the room that was monitoring my heartbeat. I hardly breathed, and the nurse's kind eyes took on a kind of panicked look, like a deer caught in head lights.

"Grace?" She asked me. "Breathe. I need you to breathe." She said, and when I took the smallest gasp of breaths, than stopped again, she gently untapped the wire from under my nose and unhooked an oxygen mask from the wall, than strapped it to my face. I took another spastic breath, and eventually another, than another, until I had a semi-steady breathing pattern, and she took the oxygen mask off slowly. "Grace? Do you want to see your sister?" She asked. I nodded a little, and she slipped quietly into the hall. There was a large, plate glass window between my room and the hallway outside in the wall, and I saw the nurses at the nurses' station watching me with a mix of pity and sympathy. I ignored them.

_Mom's dead_, I thought with disbelief, frowning. It was simply two big an idea to wrap my head around. I tried to grasp it for a moment, but it was tantalizingly hard to understand. Not that it was something I wanted to understand, but I knew, somewhere in my mind, that avoiding the truth would only hurt me more once it finally hit me. My free hand (the other was in the full-arm cast on my left arm) grabbed the covers and clutched them for dear life, like I had in the car, when it had crashed.

The nurse came in with Maddie, and I was shocked for a moment, at how much Maddie didn't look like Maddie.

Her hair color was the same. Her skin color was the same. Her eye color was even the same indigo color it had been when we'd crashed. But there was something about her that drooped. She watched the ground, her back bent over like she was the hunch back of Notre Dame. Her hair seemed flatter, straighter. Every bit of cheerfulness and silliness that had made Maddie, _Maddie_ was no longer there. She looked up at me with frightened eyes and instantly broke away from the nurse, who'd been holding her hand, and clambered onto the bed and crawled into my lap. Then she buried her face in my shoulder and proceeded to burst into tears.

I wrapped my arms around her as tears brewed in my eyes, and buried my face in her hair, crying into her hair, wishing I knew something brave and older-sister-like to do. I wanted to take care of Maddie so badly, but I had absolutely no idea how to go about doing that. My tears kept pouring, through, since I had no idea what else it was I was supposed to be doing.

"Mommy's dead," She hiccupped, her voice a whisper and broken, and I hugged her tighter.

"I know," I whispered, pain tearing through my throat, vocal cords, and heart.

"I thought you were dead too," She sob-whispered after a moment, and I felt more tears fight their way angrily out of my eyes and pour down my face.

"I'm sorry." I told her. The pain in my chest was unbearable: the lump in my throat made it difficult to breathe. But I held onto my sister with the same intensity as if holding onto her could hold me down—both of us—to earth, and keep us both from completely losing our minds. As if holding onto Maddie was the only thing that could keep us grounded to Earth, something everyone else seemed to do so effortlessly. I suddenly envied everyone that could manage to do that, that could stand there and watch us with pity—_those poor little girls, _they'd think. _Motherless_. And indeed we were.

Maddie was finally the one to pull away, a confused look haunting her face as the tears continued to stream silently, steadily, over her face. She looked like she'd been standing on what she'd believed to be firm ground, before suddenly realizing that she was actually sinking, as if she was standing in quick sand. "Where are we gonna live?" She whispered. "Who are we gonna live with?"

I hadn't even thought of these things, and I suddenly wished I could be a better older sister. I wished I knew what to do when my mom died. How to take care of my little sister because she was eight-years-old and not capable of taking care of herself. I was barely even capable of taking care of myself.

"I don't know." I whispered.

"Grace? Maddie?" The nurse asked. "Could we call someone for you?" I sighed. "I mean, you two have no adult here…and social services is going to get involved unless you have another close relative or some family friend who can be here in the next twenty four hours and take care of you two."

"Can I use this phone?" I asked her, gesturing to the phone on my bed side table. She nodded, and I picked it up, calling information.

"City and State," I heard an automated voice ask, and I wondered idly if I was doing something incredibly stupid. _Yes,_ some analytical part of my mind told me in a tolerant voice. _This may be the stupidest thing you've ever done_.

"Ruby Falls, Virginia," I murmured, and Maddie looked up at me, her eyes filled with sudden understanding. She shook her head emphatically, but I shrugged: I wasn't sure what other option we had. Trying to see if my father actually existed was a long shot, but a worthwhile one. At least then, when I was in a foster home, I wouldn't be driving myself crazy with the thought: what if I'd called him, what if he exists, what if he wanted to take us in. What ifs were things that could keep you up at night.

"How may I help you?" I heard a woman's voice ask.

"I'm looking for Scott Hale in Ruby Falls, Virginia." I said in a dazed voice. I heard the sound of someone typing, the clicking of the keys being pressed by someone with those long, fake fingernails.

"I'll put you through," She said, then hung up, and then I heard more ringing. It rang three times, and then a teenage boy picked up.

"Hey," He said, laughing, in a familiar voice, and I was surprised for a moment. "Merry Christmas!"

"Hi." I said, trying to sound normalish. "Uh…Same to you. Can I talk to Scott, please?" I asked, and I knew my voice sounded like I was Maddie's age, as opposed to thirteen-years-old. Whenever I got really nervous, or frightened, or apprehensive, my voice became ridiculously high-pitched, and it made me sound like I was Maddie.

"Sure," The boy said, laughter still in his voice, the way my mom used to thread colorful ribbons through Maddie's braids on holidays or for dress-up when she was younger, so she could feel like a princess. "Who's calling?"

I hesitated for a moment. "Grace Hale," I said finally, and I heard a small intake of breath on the other end. "I think I really need to Scott, like, now, though, so if you could put him on, that would be really great."

"Gracie?" the boy asked in an awestruck voice. Something in his voice triggered a memory, tugging at my mind, but I couldn't quite place how I knew it. How did this boy know me, though? And he was obviously familiar with me, or had been, a long time ago: he called me Gracie, a nickname my mother had coined when I was a baby. My preschool drawings all had Gracie Hale written in the corner of them. I'd lost the nickname in third grade though, in my effort to pretend I was all mature.

"Yeah…people call me that. I need to talk to Scott…" I said my voice drifting off. "Or I guess…I don't know." I looked down at Maddie. "Dad?" My voice was a complete question. Maddie wrinkled her nose at the foreign word.

"Yeah, of course. I mean…yeah." The boy said hastily on the other end, and I heard him call out, away from the receiver, even though I still heard him. "Hey Dad? Can you pick up line one? I think it's…well, I think its Gracie." Someone mumbled something incoherent wherever the boy I was talking to was. "Yeah, _that_ Gracie. Do we know that many 'Gracies' that I'd sound like that with? I mean seriously, Michael," He came back on. "Okay, here's Dad." He said, passing the phone.

"Hello?" I heard a half-eager, half-dread-filled voice ask.

"Hey Scott," I said, taking a deep breath. "My name's Grace Hale. I think I'm your daughter."

* * *

Six hours later, Maddie and I were sitting on our beds. After a mini-tantrum from Maddie, the nurses had moved her bed into my room and we were sitting there, talking quietly about the thing I'd just set in motion. The awful truth was, as big and scary as the concept of having a father after our mother had died was, it was our only option, other than foster care, and there was no guarantee that Maddie and I could stay together in foster care, so we'd _love_ to avoid that.

After Scott had recovered from the initial shock of realizing that I existed, he promised that he and the 'boys' would be right over. Who the boys were, I had no idea, but I wasn't going to try to figure it out on the phone, because that was a waste of time. Maddie and I needed an adult who could take control of the situation, and he was as close we were getting to adult, right then.

I hadn't exactly told him that Mom was dead, though.

I had instantly regretted it the moment I hung up the phone. But it wasn't like I could just call him back and say 'hey, I forgot to mention that my mother's dead'. I'd told him we were in a car crash, but he seemed more interested in how I was doing: he hadn't mentioned Mom.

By the time Maddie and I were talking about him, I was maybe the most nervous person on the face of the earth. I was practically _shaking_, that's how frightened I was. My father was making an appearance in my life for the first time, and I was in a hospital, recovering from my mother's death and a car crash. I didn't want another big, life-changing event, but as far as I could tell, I wasn't getting much of say in it.

"What if he's mean?" Maddie whispered. She hadn't talked over a whisper since the car crash. Even the tantrum had been mainly screaming and crying, as opposed to actual words.

In all truth, I was worried about Maddie. As much as I tried to pound down what was going on, I knew that I could only stomach so much before I snapped. And when I snapped, I _snapped_: I was upset, and I let the whole world know it once I'd lost my mind on that level. But first I had to make sure that Maddie was being taken care of. I couldn't just leave her to deal without me. Also…guilt was sort of haunting me. There was something about the whole concept of calling my father that seemed sort of like a betrayal. My mother had been amazingly reluctant in telling us about our father. I had to assume something was wrong with him. But what? Was he a jerk? Had he cheated on Mom? Had he…I hated to even think this, but abused one of us?

I sighed and went back to Maddie's question, not wanting to lie to her, but feeling as if I had no other option.

"He won't be. He and Mom were together, and Mom's not a bad judge of character. How do you think we got here?" I asked, trying to make my little sister at least smile. Her face remained as scared as ever, as deer-in-headlights as she'd ever been, and I winced audibly, wishing that this wasn't happening, that I had some vague idea of what was about to happen.

"Hello?" I heard someone ask quietly from the doorway, and I turned my head quickly, my dark hair flying. I'd brushed it since I'd woken up, and as it swung around my neck I felt annoyance shade me distantly, knowing it would knot as it flew. And that's when I saw the boys.

There were four. An adult, a boy about my age, maybe a little older, a boy who looked about seventeen, and another who looked about eighteen. I stared at them for a moment before seeing the obvious resemblances between me and them. It was painfully obvious that the three boys and man were related to Maddie and I.

The adult looked shocked, but happiness was scattered over his features. The oldest of the boys looked frozen in time, as if Maddie and I had come from another dimension. He was watching us, scrutinizing us, judging us, with a surprised look on his face. The second oldest looked like a deer caught in headlights. And the youngest boy—who was still a year older than me—looked happily surprised.

"Oh my god." I murmured, my eyes traveling over them. They were staring right back at me, no shame in their gazes, and I turned my head away, my eyes resting first on the floor than the blankets on my bed. But that couldn't last long: curiosity gravitated my eyes up to the boys standing in front of me.

"Grace." The adult said. "Hi. Wow. I'm Scott, your Dad," He said slowly, his eyes resting first on me, then on Maddie. "And who is this?" He asked softly, smiling hesitantly at Maddie. Maddie stared at all four guys with wide, frightened eyes before scrambling off her bed and onto mine, crawling into my lap and sitting there with her knees drawn up to her chest.

"This is Maddie," I said softly as she pulled my arms around her, as if I was a blanket to cover her. "She's…my sister," I frowned. "Who are they?" I asked quietly, nodding at the boys. They stared at me outright, as if there was something wrong with me, and I self consciously lifted one of my arms and tucked a few strands of my hair behind my ears, before Maddie reached up and grabbed my arm, pulling it back down so my arms were wrapped around her waist.

"Your brothers." Scott—Dad?—said. I swallowed hard, and Maddie squeaked. "And I thought I only had one daughter. Unless…she's someone else's…" Scott said, his voice trailing off, and I shook my head.

"No." I said firmly. "Mom doesn't—" I stopped, tears jumping to my eyes and my voice breaking off abruptly. "Mom _didn't_," I continued softly, my voice determinedly cheerful, which sort of defied the purpose, now. "She didn't date. She never went out with a single guy." I hugged Maddie closer to me, and she continued to stare.

"Well…I mean…we were…you were…" Scott tried a few times before shrugging. "Never mind." Scott shook his head. "Later. We'll work through all the details later."

Scott was in his late forties, about, with graying light brown hair. He was _very_ tall—maybe six feet, four inches—and his eyes were indigo blue, like Maddie's, and I took a deep breath. Wow. They were _exactly _like Maddie's.

"She's your kid," One of the boys said, the middle one. He pointed first to Maddie's eyes vaguely, than nodded at Scott, his eyes glued to me so much that he couldn't even turn his eyes to look at someone else. I was staring back though, so I supposed I couldn't talk too much about it. "You guys have the creepy colored eyes thing going on."

"That was _very_ nice," Scott said sarcastically, turning back to his son to scold him. Then he looked around. "Where's Addie?" He asked. I bit my lip and looked away, a tear streaking down my face. "I can't believe that she would go through a car crash with you two than leave you alone." His voice was a little bitter, and my arms tightened around Maddie at the sound of my mother's name.

"Mommy didn't live through the car crash." Maddie whispered for me, explaining everything as I pressed my cheek to her hair, resting my head on top of hers. "I thought Gracie was dead. So did the people in the helicopter." My brothers all stared first at her, than at me, and I pressed my lips together, more tears breaking free as I struggled to control myself. "Mommy's dead."

Scott groaned softly, sinking into one of the chairs against the wall. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and placed his face in his hands carefully, as if afraid he'd break himself. "Addie's dead?" He murmured, looking up at me with blind eyes, filled with grief. I was surprised, I had to admit: Mom and Dad had been separated for at least as long as I'd been alive. I sobbed once, nodding as I wiped away my tears with my hand roughly. My brothers looked increasingly frightened as I broke down in tears.

"Umm…" The oldest one said. "I think this would be a good time for us to go get some food or something…" He said. I forced myself to stop crying; I wanted to find out more about my brothers before they disappeared again.

"I'm fine." I said in a determined voice. I narrowed my eyes. Suddenly a name popped into my head, along with a picture of a laughing little boy. I'd been a little girl, under four, certainly, and I'd been building some structure with Legos. William had caught it as it collapsed…and helped me rebuild. A smile played over my lips, and my mind raced, wondering with instant curiosity where this memory had come from. "Will," I said softly. He blinked.

"Yeah." He said quietly. "People call me William, now, though. I'm eighteen." His facial expression didn't change. "I was nine last time we saw each other." Something in his eyes shifted as he continued to watch me, and I hung my head a little, letting my hair fall down to shield my face from his unyielding stare.

Will had black hair, hastily arranged over his forehead, and the exact same color as mine. He was tall and definitely muscled, but in a more subtle way than the middle of my brothers, who looked like superman personified with light brown hair and light skin. But Will's skin was deeply tanned, and I realized suddenly that he looked a lot like me. For all that I'd always been the outsider in appearances in my family (between my mother and my sister, at least), it looked like I was going to fit right in with my brothers. William and my other two brothers had black-brown hair and deeply tanned skin.

"That would have made me four." I said slowly trying to think through the fog on my mind created partially by morphine and partially by what I was facing right now. "Wait, we lived together? You've met me before?" I asked in a dazed voice. I pressed the heels of my hands to my forehead and squeezed my eyes shut. "God. I'm so confused."

"Yeah." He said, his voice thoughtful. "You're my little sister. We lived together for four years." He said this slowly, as if he was trying to gauge my reaction, but he seemed less concerned about me than he was about his father: he switched his gaze from me to his father, and then waved over his brothers. Only his youngest brother came, though—the middle one just continued to stare at Maddie and me.

"Dad?" The youngest boy (or at least the shortest--I couldn't be sure whether he was youngest or not, though he certainly looked it) asked. "You okay?" Scott didn't move, his head in his hands, and the boys in front of me, Maddie and I all stared at him when he didn't answer.

"Addie's dead." He said in a strangled voice, and I sank back against my pillows softly, looking down at the covers on my bed.

"Yeah," Will replied swiftly with a bitter note to his voice. I looked up at him, surprised and he met my eyes with a defiant and frustrated look, as if he was searching for something that he knew he'd never find. As if he knew that he was running in circles, and he wanted to stop so badly, but it was all he could do to catch his breath, much less turn in a new direction. "But Dad, the day she left with Gracie was the day she died." He glared at me swiftly, "You've ruined my life, you know. Leaving. And returning" He stalked out of the room in a huff, leaving enough tension for a bigger room, and I stared after him in confusion before looking back at my other brothers. But they looked up at me, their gazes showing their surprise at both their brother's reaction and my existence.

We weren't even on a first name basis, though, so it wasn't like I could ask either of them about what William was talking about. I had no idea who these two boys were, how old they were. All I knew was that we had extremely similar DNA, the same parents, same gene pool. That, at some point in my unremembered childhood, I'd known them as my brothers, not the strangers standing in my hospital room.

"Sorry," the youngest one said gruffly, and the two of them followed Will into the hallway as naturally as if Will had politely excused himself after a very nice, measured conversation.

"Woah," Maddie whispered, staring at our father, who was still having some sort of quiet mental breakdown, judging by the pained look on his face, his eyes (which were squeezed shut) and the wrinkles around them as he pressed two fingers to each temple, trying to contain a headache before it got out of hand. I closed my eyes and leaned my head back onto my pillows.

"Yeah," I agreed. "Woah,"

Brothers were a _way _bigger deal than everyone else made it sound.


	2. The Truth, Loud and Clear

_A/N: Heyy guys...thanks for the review (my very first!!) Xx Hidden Secret xX...it's so fabulous that I've had nine hits...idk if that's a lot, but I'm still happy. :D_

_please review, guys...i really don't care if it's an anonymous review or not. I just want some actual evidence that other people are reading this story._

_that goes for you two Marin! lol._

_xoxoxo_

_Chica912_

* * *

Chapter 2

December 26, 2007

_"In every conceivable manner, the family is the link to our past, bridge to our future." —Alex Haley_

"Gracie?" I heard someone ask the next morning. "Can you wake up? Maddie's kind of freaking out…" I groaned and rolled over, then pain shot through my forehead as pressure from my pillow pressed on it, and I gave up trying to sleep. I rolled over again, so I was on the edge of my bed, and opened my eyes and saw one of my brothers, the youngest one, whose name I still didn't know, and wished groggily that I had a better grasp of this situation. Knowing my brothers' names were such basic pieces of information that it was sort of embarrassing for me to admit that I didn't know them.

For some reason, it bugged me more than it should have. I couldn't get over it. They were my _brothers_. Most sisters could tell you more about their brothers than you'd ever want to know. I couldn't even tell you their names.

After Will had stormed out yesterday, Scott had just sat there for another two hours. It was obvious that my father had yet to get over my mother. And even though I still wasn't sure what had happened between them, last night had made me pretty sure that it was my mother's idea to leave, and my father's idea to wait for her to come back.

But by the time Scott actually got up to go get some dinner at the hospital cafeteria, it was eight o'clock at night, and the nurses, since Maddie and I were so tired and that I was in pain from my arm, had given us medication to go to sleep. And recovering from a car crash was tiring, even if I'd slept the four days before that.

Technically, though, I hadn't been asleep. I'd been out cold. For four days. The nurse had explained that when the car had hit the other car, my head had hit the back of the driver's seat, causing a severe concussion and knocking me out. In the helicopter, the paramedics had thought I'd been brain-dead, and said as much. Which was why Maddie had thought I was dead, for however short of a time, because she was eight and no one had ever explained the concept of brain-dead to her, so she'd just taken the word 'dead' and there'd been no one to correct her. The nurse had also explained that the paramedics were getting 'talked to' for telling their patient's eight-year-old sister that their patient was brain-dead before they were one hundred percent sure: it was awful judgment, and had scared Maddie to death.

"What d'you mean?" I mumbled, sitting up and rubbing my eyes tiredly. "And what's your name?" The boy stared at me for a moment, surprised at my question, and I scolded myself mentally: I couldn't have just a little bit more tact in this entire situation? It wasn't like my brothers weren't freaking out too: Will's reaction yesterday had proved it. It must have scared them to death to get a random call, Christmas day, from their long-gone sister. And then to find out that their mother was dead, and that they had _another_ little sister…God, I was glad I wasn't those boys right now. I may have been having a bad time of it, but my brothers didn't exactly have it easy, either.

The name William still seemed foreign to me. It just seemed different, now that I was applying it to one of my brothers, instead of the name that had just randomly been in my head. You know how you sometimes just _know _names, but you don't personally know anyone who actually has it? I was like that with the name 'William', even though it was crazily common. I'd never known a William, personally, at least: I'd met one in passing at Mom's office, but no one who I'd then become friends with.

"Adam," The youngest of my older brothers said. "I'm one year older than you." He smiled faintly at me, as if still too thrown off by my question to actually answer completely coherently. "I was five when you and Mom left." He glanced over at Maddie, his smile fading, and I felt myself bristle instinctively: didn't he like Maddie? "But Maddie is kind of freaking out." I looked over at my little sister.

She was paler than I'd ever seen her, and her eyes were perfectly round. Her knees were pulled up to her chest, her little arms wrapped around them, and she had oh-my-god-what's-going-on written all over her face. "Maddie," I said softly, and she didn't respond. "She doesn't usually do this," I told Adam with a quick glance for him. "Really." I reached out—this is how close Maddie's and my beds were—and grasped her arm gently, shaking her a little. "Mads?" I whispered. "You okay?"

"We have a father," She whispered. I sighed, hanging my head for a moment. Then I looked up at her. "Three brothers."

"I know," I told her.

"They didn't know I existed." She whispered. "They knew that you existed. They _missed_ you. They knew Mom existed." She turned to me. "They didn't miss her, but they knew she existed. They didn't know that I existed."

"I think we left before you were born," I explained softly, looking at Adam for conformation. He nodded, watching Maddie carefully.

"I know," she whispered. "But they _missed_ you. They didn't even know I was alive." Her voice was filled with pain, and it hurt me to listen to her so upset. I wished suddenly that my mom was there: Mom could get Maddie out of a weird mood faster than anyone. Even I wasn't any good at it and Maddie and I had always been close, despite the five year age difference between us. "They said they missed you."

"They couldn't have known you were alive, Maddie. Mom and you and I left when she was pregnant with you, before she'd even told our father." Then I remembered something else she had said. "When'd they say that they missed me?" I asked, focusing in on Maddie, my puzzlement clear in my voice.

"Last night." She whispered. "They were talking."

"Okay, now it's time for the newly found little sisters to be quiet," Adam said good-naturedly, and I smiled at him curiously, not sure what to make of my new older brother. He wasn't anything like William, as far as I could tell—he was easy-going, and had related well to Maddie. I didn't know a lot about him, but so far, being nothing like William seemed about as good as you could get, considering William was acting like the biggest coward in the entire world; because he didn't like his little sisters, or wasn't used to them in ten minutes or less, he had stormed out. Like I said. Biggest coward in the world.

"Okay." Maddie whispered. Adam grinned at her.

"What were you talking about?" I asked, and Adam fixed me with a mock-glare.

"None of your business." He told me.

"Let's see. If this conversation involved my three brothers, my sister, and my father, then _yeah_, it involves me." I said, and Adam's mock-glare faded into a real one, and I glared back, undeterred. My brothers didn't scare me, and I knew I scared them.

"Someone's cranky," He muttered, disgruntled, but his eyes flickered away, flustered at my reaction.

"Sorry," I said, relenting after a moment and shrugging. "Rough week." He nodded in agreement, and I turned my head away to look around the room. "Where are your brothers?" I asked.

"_Our_ brothers," Adam corrected. "Our brothers and I would guess the hospital cafeteria for Michael and…" he glanced at the watch on his wrist, "And I'm pretty sure that Will's in school right now, unless he's ditching. Which, frankly, isn't that uncommon." I stared at him for a moment.

"Don't you live in Virginia?" I asked slowly. He nodded, looking a little embarrassed and defensive.

"He stormed out of the hospital and into the car." Adam said, avoiding my gaze. I felt my mouth open a little. That had surprised me.

"Wow." I said. "Umm…Isn't he…a little…" I tilted my head to the side, trying to figure out what was going on. "That's a little…immature." Adam looked uncomfortable for a moment, as if he was caught between defending his brother and admitting the truth: that William had completely overreacted.

"It was a…delayed reaction." Adam said quietly, as if he was embarrassed, and I frowned, surprised by his response. I'd been expecting an 'I'm sorry' or 'Yeah, that was pretty stupid of him'. But I hadn't been expecting 'delayed reaction'.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"I mean, when you and Mom disappeared, Will held it together for us. Dad was panicking with the police and everything. I was five-years-old. Michael was eight. So Will had to keep it together." He shrugged, and I crossed my arms over my chest uncomfortably, hugging myself. It was harder to dislike a boy who held his family together when his mom and sister. But I still did. I wasn't exactly completely comfortable with the whole concept of having three brothers where I'd once had none, but I was dealing with it. William, in the manner of a two-year-old, had stormed out because he wasn't used to his little sisters in about two minutes. I was the thirteen-year-old girl—wasn't I supposed to be a drama queen? The only reason I was asking is because I was pretty sure that Will had that spot covered.

The term 'disappeared' still freaked me out a little. I didn't completely understand what was going on now, much less what had happened nine-years-ago. Had I quite literally, disappeared? Had I _done _something that had made it necessary for Mom and me to disappear? Had Scott done something? Had Scott and Mom divorced before Mom took us, and _then_ kidnapped us because she freaked out in the middle of a custody battle? Because I knew my mother—the one who obeyed traffic laws religiously, the one who played sports with the utmost fairness, to the extent where she would vouch for the other team when Maddie was playing soccer against someone else, or would tell my coach about a foul I committed when I was playing basketball. Mom wouldn't just up and leave, taking her four-year-old and unborn daughters with her, without telling her husband that she was leaving, or that she was pregnant. That was something a crazy woman did, or a woman who thought that the man who would be raising her child would hurt her, or her children. But Scott had raised three sons, mostly by himself. It didn't seem like he was particularly dangerous. And Adam and William didn't seem like boys who would let themselves be pushed around by an abusive father. Will didn't seem like the kind of boy who would let himself be pushed around by _anyone_. I didn't know the middle kid yet—I didn't even know his _name_ for sure, although I had a guess that it was Michael—but he was a big enough kid that Scott pushing him around seemed kind of unlikely.

"Wait, slow down," I begged, though I wasn't entirely sure whether I was talking to my brother or myself. "You mean…okay, Michael is your older brother and Will's younger, right?" I asked. Adam nodded. I struggled to remember something about any of these boys, but all I had in my memory was that original thing about William.

"Yeah." Adam said, nodding. "Mike's seventeen. Will's eighteen, and I'm fourteen."

"And…Dad is where?" I asked, but that was yet another foreign word to me. As much as I'd always wanted a Dad, I hadn't expected him to pop up with my three brothers in tow. I'd expected him to show up at our door one day, with an excuse for why he'd left. But he hadn't left. And I'd been the one who'd ended up finding him. In the hospital. And my reality sort of sucked, when compared to fantasy. But then again, fantasy was nearly always better than reality, so I really shouldn't have been so surprised.

"Dad's in the cafeteria with Michael." He explained quietly. He sat back against the footboard of my bed, watching me with curiosity. We just looked at each other, and then I looked away, feeling stupid. What was I supposed to say to him?

"Dad." I echoed softly. Adam watched me for a moment with a peculiar look on his face before turning to Maddie.

"Maddie, I need to talk to Gracie for a minute." Adam said softly. "Do you think maybe you could go find Michael and Dad in the hospital cafeteria? We're probably gonna need to talk about a lot of stuff. And that involves them. And you."

"Okay," Maddie said, and slowly got up, walking out of the room. I watched her go until she shut the door behind her, and then I leaned my head back against the headboard, feeling exhausted.

"So you wanted to talk?" I asked after a moment.

"Yeah." He shrugged, "Look, Gracie, this is going to sound really random, but did your Mom leave any instructions for you and Maddie in case she died?" I stared at him for a moment, and he blushed, embarrassed.

"Wow." I said after a moment. "You're right. That _did_ sound really random."

"I know it's really abrupt and sort of rude, but Dad wants to know because…he kinda wants custody of you guys, but he doesn't want to put us all through another custody battle, so…yeah." Adam shrugged, and I frowned.

"Another custody battle?" I asked softly. Pity and sympathy crossed his face, and I felt frustration enter my own features: I hated all pity and sympathy, and so far that was all I had earned from my brothers.

"Mom and Dad had one during the divorce." He explained. "It got pretty vicious. Michael and Will had made it clear early on that they weren't staying with Mom, but you and I were too young to have a real grasp on what was going on. You were three, I was four." I frowned, and he sighed, shrugging. "And let me guess. You don't remember, do you?" I shook my head a little, dropping my head and looking at the blankets, embarrassed. I'd been three-years-old. That wasn't old enough to have concrete memories, but it was definitely old enough to have some idea of brothers, family, a house. "Look, Gracie, that's okay. It's okay to not remember." Adam told me softly.

"No, it's not," I said. When Adam began to object, I continued, "You guys are my family. I should remember. But all I remember is Mom, and the one-story house in Troy." I shook my head. "That's all. I mean, I remember Will catching the Lego blocks as they fell and helping me rebuild a Lego house, but that's about all I've got, and that's not particularly meaningful." I sighed, and my shoulders slumped. "You guys remember me. I existed, once. All I've got are some stupid Legos." I scowled and looked up at Adam. "I don't even have any idea what happened with Mom and me, or why Will freaked out, or what the heck is going on." I flung myself back on my covers and felt my head protest a little, but I ignored the pain before crossing my arms as much as I could (there was a cast on my arm). I instantly felt like a four-year-old—I had my arms crossed and I was pouting—but it was nice, for that second, to not have to act responsible. I didn't usually act that way.

"Mom kidnapped you, Gracie," Adam said, startled into the truth, and I felt my blood stop in my veins, heard my small intake of breath. Pain ripped through me at the word _Mom, _together with the word _kidnapped_. You'd think it wouldn't be painful to listen to someone say mere words—you know that saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me". Well, I think it's a complete and total lie. The words that my brother had just said had cut me deeply. The scar from hearing something so mind-blowing so suddenly instantly hit me, and surviving under the weight of that information was getting harder by the second.

"Mom…kidnapped…me." I said with some difficulty once I remembered to breathe. "You can't be serious." I said, shaking my head. "That's impossible." I felt my breathing come faster, and pain filled my chest from my bruised ribs. Adam was watching me sadly, and I turned my head away, feeling tears swirl in my eyes. "No. She couldn't have." My voice was vulnerable now, and I hated it. "No. Wait. Adam. You're…please tell me…that you're lying, or joking, or..." I looked up at him desperately, and he shook his head a little. "But only crazy people kidnap their daughters. Crazy, desperate people. Obsessed people. My mother wasn't crazy, or obsessed, not in a creepy way that makes people kidnap other people."

"I'm sorry." He murmured. I bit my lip, tears now pouring down my face. "I'm so, so, so sorry." I opened my mouth as if to say something, than closed it, lacking anything to actually say. I stared at Adam, speechless and seeming to have lost all ability to move. I couldn't even think. I could just sit there, tears streaming down my face without my consent.

"Adam, do you want some chips? Cuz there's a vending…what'd you do to Gracie?" I heard a boy's voice ask, horrified. I looked up at my second oldest brother as he followed Maddie into the bedroom. He looked like he was a little scared of me.

Michael was superman personified, as I'd realized yesterday. He had dark blonde hair, like Maddie's, that was in a crew cut, and he had deep set, sharp green eyes. His skin was tanned in a sort of natural way, and he was _massive_: he was seriously strong, and looked it, and he was about six feet, five inches tall. He could have been seriously scary, but there was something honest in his face, almost sweet, but not quite. He looked trustworthy.

"What'd you do?" Seventeen-year-old Michael demanded, again, looking from me, to Adam, down at Maddie, than back at me. "I was gone for maybe ten minutes, and you made her _cry_? She could've only woken up five minutes ago. I mean, seriously, Adam."

"I didn't mean to!" Adam pled, and Michael sighed, watching me warily. I kept crying steadily, and I felt Maddie's concerned gaze on my face. She waited for a moment, then walked the five feet from the doorway to the side of my bed, passing Adam and Michael, and crawled onto my bed and sat on my lap. Michael saw an opportunity: he walked up next to my bed as I swiped at my tears defensively, turning my face away.

"Hey." He said softly to Maddie. "You're Maddie, right? You didn't talk in the cafeteria." His voice was gentle, and something in it must have made Maddie more comfortable, because she nodded once. "I'm Michael. I'm seventeen." Maddie nodded once more, showing her understanding of what he was saying. "What did Adam tell Gracie? Do you know?" His concerned eyes wandered over me, then went back to Maddie. "Did he tell her before you left to come get me and Dad?"

"No. But why'd he make her cry?" Maddie asked Michael, glaring at Adam defensively. "Gracie doesn't cry a lot. She didn't cry when she was playing basketball and Jen's brother elbowed her in the face." She explained, looking anxiously up at me. "She cried yesterday, but Mommy _died_, and Mommy said that if people didn't cry when their family died, that meant they were hiding it inside and they could get really passive-aggressive." Then she looked at Adam, her face contorting into an even angrier glare. Michael and Adam glanced at each other, and Adam mouthed the word _kidnapping_.

"Adam, you really need to learn how to handle thing one and thing two." Michael hissed at Adam under his breath. "Seriously. Their mother just died. And then you tell them that she was a criminal. What processed you? It better have been the freakin' devil, cuz that might have been the stupidest thing you've ever done."

"He said that Mom had kidnapped me." I admitted softly after a moment, seeming to regain my motor skills. "That's not true, right?" Maddie looked desperately up at me, and I hugged my sister.

"Well, yeah…" Michael said. "It is kinda true. Really true, actually. There's an entire police force that will attest to that. But I know that's probably not the most comforting thing you've heard today. And that maybe, Adam didn't have the best timing." He elbowed his brother and scowled at him, and Adam shrugged.

"Mommy kidnapped Gracie." Maddie whispered, looking up at Michael with a terrified expression. "Mommy kidnapped Gracie. Why'd Mommy kidnap you?" Maddie tilted her head back and stared up at me. "Kidnappers are bad people." She sobbed. "Mommy isn't a bad person!" Her voice suddenly became viciously angry, cruelly cutting through all the lies I could tell myself about what was going on. "Mommy isn't a bad person! Gracie, why'd Mommy kidnap you?" Her voice was shrill and angry, and I sighed, searching for something to tell her, but all that happened was that I circled back to the truth I knew. It was something, when I had nothing. It wasn't _a lot_ of something, but it was a little bit of something, and I owed Maddie at least that.

"I don't know." I told her softly, scrubbing my eyes with the back of my hand, as if that could make me see more clearly, make me understand what was going on, on some sort of higher level. I took a deep breath as I struggled to think of something to say to Maddie, Adam, and Michael that would help each of them: I couldn't collapse yet. Not until I trusted my brothers to take care of Maddie while I was collapsing.

"Mommy was a kidnapper?" She looked at Michael, trusting him automatically, in that way that little kids did. It was the entire reason that kidnappings happened: as long as people were nice to the little kids, the little kids never protested. Even through the instructions that they weren't supposed to go with strangers, somehow, the offering of kindness beat being scolded for going off with strangers.

Then I had an awful, awful thought.

Had I done that with Mom?

Had that been what made me spend the last nine years not knowing who my father was, not knowing that I had three brothers? Had that been what had made William so angry? The fact that I had trusted my mother had stolen nine years of a relationship from my brothers, father, sister and I.

I had to have trusted someone I shouldn't have. I mean, it couldn't have happened if I hadn't trusted someone who wasn't worth trusting. I mean, my mother wouldn't have dragged me away from my brothers and father kicking and screaming. Will, Michael, Adam and Scott wouldn't have let me go that way, would they? Sure, William was acting like a complete jerk, but really, that probably had roots in my kidnapping. Something had to have happened the day that I was kidnapped. My brothers and father wouldn't have let me go, and my mother wouldn't have taken me without someone's consent. Someone must have said my mother could take me. She wasn't a bad person. Only bad people stole children. Very bad people. My mother didn't even break little traffic laws.

"Oh my god," I murmured under my breath, scrubbing at my eyes again. They were incredibly itchy, and tearing up again, I knew, but I ignored it, hoping it would go away. It was useless, I knew, to hope that kind of thing, but it was better to hope that something good could happen rather than simply live with the knowledge that it didn't matter whether I thought it should happen or not.

"Why the hell did you have to tell her that?" Michael demanded finally, glaring at his little brother. Maddie nodded in agreement, her eye brows coming together to form a sort of funny look on a eight-year-old: she looked old and tired, even though she was really just a little girl. "Seriously, Adam. Exercise some common sense. Mom just _died,_" Maddie and I sobbed at the word, and he shot us an apologetic look before glaring again at Adam. "And you're telling them that she was a criminal?"

"She asked!" Adam defended himself.

"She asked?" Michael asked flatly, skeptically. "She asked you if her mother had kidnapped her when she was so young that she probably didn't remember?"

"Well, not exactly…" Adam said guiltily, like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. He shrugged uncomfortably. "Look. I didn't mean to."

"Well, yeah, of course you didn't mean to make 'em cry." Michael said uneasily, his eyes drifting over my tears with all the discomfort that a seventeen-year-old boy would have when handling a crying thirteen-year-old girl. "But you still _did_."

"Yeah," Adam agreed hastily, shooting us a semi-frightened, semi-sad look before focusing in on me with the same expression on. "But Gracie doesn't remember. Anything. And I was surprised, so I just sorta blurted it out…it was an accident."

"Nothing?" Michael asked, looking first at Adam, than at me. "You don't remember anything? At all?"

"Something about William and Lego blocks, but it's _really_ vague. Like…like it didn't seem important at the time " I admitted softly, then sniffed. "I was kidnapped?"

"How can you not remember?" Adam demanded. "I mean, really. How can you not remember," It was more of a statement of wonder than an actual question. "You were four-years-old. That's old enough to know what's going on, to some extent. Know that you have brothers, at least. And know your phone number. And your father." I bit my lip, sinking back into my pillows, giving my brothers a reproachful look, and Adam sighed. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that it's your fault. It's just…there is something wrong if you don't remember what happened that day." Adam said, worried.

"Please shut up," I murmured. "I'm trying to wrap my mind around that fact that my mother is a kidnapper _and_ that she's dead. It's hard enough without being told that it's a really big problem that I can't remember much of anything before I was four."

"Alright," Michael said, shrugging in acceptance. I could see some confusion in his face though, and I ignored it. I had to anchor my sister and myself to reality. My brothers could handle themselves (I hoped).

"Do you wanna call someone?" Adam asked finally. "A friend? I mean, Mike and I aren't gonna be much help." He admitted. "And one of your friends from school must know you a lot better than we do, which is sort of sad, considering we're siblings, but we haven't talked in nine years, so it's sort of justified," His voice took on a rambling tone.

"No one at school talks to me." I told them. "I can't go to parties because I'm Maddie's permanent babysitter, and I can't pay for the kinds of clothes they wear." I shrugged. "Mom couldn't afford a babysitter, much less a new outfit." Adam frowned.

"Couldn't afford a babysitter?" Adam asked, surprised.

"There wasn't a lot of money to go around," I muttered defensively. "Even with Mom working extra hours at the firm."

"Really?" Michael asked. He watched me sadly. "Dad never had much of a money problem. He would have paid Mom welfare, had she asked for it. Had she not kidnapped you and kept to the agreement that she and Dad worked out in family court, with a judge, two lawyers, and one guardian ad litem there." I shrugged uncomfortably, wishing I knew to what extent he meant when he said 'guardian ad litem', or 'never had much of a money problem'. I wished I could ask without feeling uncomfortable. I wished that I could talk to my brothers without feeling so self-conscious.

"Mom wouldn't have asked for it, even if she had…been in contact with you guys. She liked earning her own way." I told them. "And she expected us to do the same." Maddie nodded. "I do well in school, don't complain." My voice broke. "I can't believe she kidnapped me. I tried so hard to make our life work for her, without asking for all sorts of junk she couldn't afford. And she turned out to be my kidnapper. I can't believe it."

"It's pretty unbelievable." Adam agreed. "Not the kind of stuff that really happens to people you know. More stuff that you hear about on the crime shows on TV."

"But…what happened? I mean…did you guys know I was okay? Or did you just think, for the last nine years that I could be…dead, or…." I asked, my voice shaking as I looked from Michael's concerned gaze to Adam's pitying one.

"We didn't know." Michael admitted quietly. "That's part of why it's so hard for Will to see you here, not hurt because of Mom, after all these years of separation. He remembers what happened that day clearer than the rest of us. So he had all the more reason to believe that you were in pain, or worse. It's a bit of a shock for him to see you here, hardly hurt only by a car accident when we all imagined nine years of damage taking its toll." My mouth opened a little—I was that surprised. "It turns out that only the last few days really did anything. But Will was sure you were hurt, badly. We all were."

"I wasn't hurt though." I said finally. "I was fine."

"But _we_ weren't, Gracie." Adam told me. "You're our little sister. And you _disappeared off the face of the earth because our mother took you from us._ It was a big deal: the detective on your case is a family friend, now, and Dad still has all your old stuff in storage because he couldn't bare to give it away. Your kidnapping was in the newspaper, on the six o'clock news." Adam shook his head, and I blinked. "We had reporters on our doorstep. At school, the teachers know our names before we had the first class because we're the boys whose sister was kidnapped. You may have been fine with Mom and Maddie. But we weren't fine by ourselves." Adam said. I stared at him, and then switched my unwavering gaze to Michael, feeling guilt well in my chest. My breath came shakily.

"Oh my god." I murmured. "Mom really destroyed you guys, didn't she?" I was so surprised that it was frightening: my throat felt tight, my lungs barely expanded with every 

breath. "How could she do that to her own sons? I mean…what made her take me and leave you guys? What made her take _me_? Why not Will, or you, or you?"

Adam smiled strangely at me, a weird look on his face. It made me think of someone who knew something was extraordinary—but also knew that it was sad, sorrowful.

"That's funny." He said softly, and Michael nodded in agreement. "You and Will think the same thing at the beginning." He watched me kindly, with that kind of reminiscent look on his face.

"What?" I asked before I could stop myself: I was reluctant to learn anymore about my past with my brothers and father than I already knew. Everything I'd learned so far had either made me wonder if my mother should have spent the last nine years in prison, or if my sister and I had missed out on nine years in a both financially and emotionally stable family for no real reason. Learning much more would destroy what I had left of my family. And that wasn't even a large amount, since Mom had been taken away only a few days ago.

"The night you were kidnapped, once it became official that that was what had happened to you, Will threw a fit." Michael admitted quietly, and I felt surprise surge through me. "Yeah, I know, it's pretty unbelievable after the small tantrum he threw yesterday because he was so damn angry. But trust me. When you guys were little, you _worshipped_ William. And he was pretty into the whole, protective-older-brother thing. That's part of why your kidnapping was the hardest on him." Michael sighed, scrutinizing me for a moment. "He was also a little hurt that Mom kidnapped you and not him. We all were."

"You were jealous of your kidnapped little sister, _because_ she was kidnapped?" I asked after a moment incredulously, and Adam scowled at me. I shrugged and winced in pain: my still-sore ribs were bothering me a little still, even though it'd been five days since the accident.

"It makes a lot more sense when you're under ten." Adam said defensively, and I shrugged, allowing it. I was too occupied recovering from the fact that my mother had kidnapped me. There wasn't much mind-power left to fight with my brothers.

My brothers watched me anxiously for a full minute as we sat there in silence as we all digested the news we'd just received, whether it was mine (my mother had kidnapped me) or it was Michael and Adam's (their sister didn't remember them. At all).

"What happens when we get out of the hospital?" I murmured finally in a dazed voice. "I mean, do Maddie and I go to you guys, or do we go into a foster home?"

"Us." Michael said firmly, as Adam looked questioningly at him, and I remembered Adam's question from earlier, the question that had set off the sequence of events that had explained to me what had happened to take me away from my father and brothers. "Definitely us."

"Is William okay with that?" I asked reluctantly: I knew the answer was 'no', but I hoped I would get a reason or two.

"I think he probably is. I mean, I know he wouldn't want you guys to go into foster care, and I know there is no way under the sun that Dad's gonna let you go to a foster home, so his opinion doesn't really matter to anyone." Adam said quickly, too quickly, but I felt exasperation flow through me at his lie.

"If he's going to hate me for the rest of my life for shoving in where I don't belong…or for coming back when staying away would have made everything so much easier…" I began, and let myself trail off, not liking either of my options.

"William hates change." Adam said shortly.

"Thank you, Adam," I told him. "Thanks ever so much. Very comforting."

"You didn't let me finish!" He protested. "William hates change. But…he usually gets over it soon enough."

"How soon?" I asked suspiciously, looking at Michael since I couldn't trust Adam to give me the truth: he was too nice. He would tell me what I wanted to hear, for the most part. And Michael was probably going to give me the truth.

"A while." Michael admitted, and I sighed.

"Anyway, when do Maddie and I get out of here?" I asked softly, trying not to think about the fact that my older brother hated me. It was making me really depressed.

"Today," Scott said softly from the doorway, and I looked up at him. He was smiling wistfully.

"Awesome." I said, trying a grin. He smiled back, seemingly appreciating the effort, and stepped forward until he was standing beside my bed.

"How are you two feeling?" He asked. I shrugged.

"I'm pretty good." I said, wincing as I shrugged. My hand flew unconsciously to my side. As I shut my eyes in pain. "Except for the shrugging. Shrugging is bad." I felt my smile fade. "Umm…Maddie's and my stuff is at _our_ house…" I said after a moment. "Are we going to pick it up? Because we kinda need our stuff. And we need to empty the house out." I frowned. "What's going to happen to the house? I mean, we're not living there anymore, obviously, and…" Scott had gotten a strange look on his face, and I stopped. "You okay?" I asked, glancing at my brothers. They shrugged, and Michael pulled the sides of his mouth down for a moment before his face relaxed as his father's did.

"I'm fine." Scott said, shrugging. "Of course, Grace, I should have thought about your and Maddie's things." He bit his lip, scrutinizing Maddie and I. "Would you two like to take care of it personally? Or should I…figure something else out?" He watched me, waiting for an answer. I thought for a moment.

"We could do it." I said hesitantly, unsure. I wasn't sure if I could clean up what remained of my mother. "Maybe." I shuddered without meaning too, and Maddie did too: she was sitting in my lap, and my shudder shifted from me to her flawlessly, as if we'd meant to do it. I wondered distantly if Maddie and I had always been this in sync, or if this was simply a last resort. We were the only familiar territory each other had left.

"If you're gonna cry again, than we need to leave." Michael said sarcastically, and I stuck my tongue out at him. He grinned at me.

"I'm not going to cry again." I said in exasperation. Then my voice fell in volume and intensity, "I don't know if I could handle cleaning up the house, though." My gaze flickered between my brothers.

"You sure you're up for it, Dad?" Adam asked easily, as if this was the simplest question in the world. "I mean, they'll be cleaning up Mom's stuff too."

"Michael, could you drive them?" Dad asked hesitantly. "I don't want to risk me being in Troy, at the house. Addie's too…real there." I looked up at him, surprised by his blunt honesty. Mom would have tip-toed around the question, or else gotten angry at you for asking it, saying she was an adult and could handle herself.

"Okay." Michael said. "I'll drive 'em."

"Thanks," I said, smiling at him. "That's really nice of you."

"Well, Will's not gonna drive you." Adam pointed out, and Michael reached out and hit him on the back of the head. Adam rolled his eyes and punched Michael in the arm.

"Boys," Scott said in a warning voice. "If you accidentally punch your sisters, I sincerely doubt either of them will enjoy that." Michael got a surprised, than grateful look on his face, and I watched him with a very small, curious smile.

"Sisters." Michael echoed quietly.

"They finally came back." Adam murmured, looking at Michael with a mystified expression.

I looked at my brothers and my father, and wondered, once more, what my mother had done to our family.


	3. Destroying the Evidence

You guys are the best! I've had 26 hits and three reviews, and again, i reiterate, i hav no idea if that's a lot or not, but still it's so great to know that this isn't totally futile.

well, a new chapter for all of you, and whether any of the 26 readers who came and went will come back or not, I have no idea, but i kno xoxoGossipGirl will be...won't you?! lol. review because it helps me get through finals.

And voila...a new chapter.

Chapter 3 

December 27, 2007

_"Family is just an accident…They don't mean to get on your nerves. They don't even mean to be your family, they just are." –Marsha Norman_

"You guys live a hell of a long way away from NYC," Adam said in an irritated voice the next day. I rolled my eyes, but continued staring out my window, avoiding talking because I wasn't entirely sure I could trust my voice not to show how scared I was.

Two of my brothers, sister and I were sitting in the car the next day, Michael driving, Adam in the passenger seat, while Maddie and I were given the backseat, as the youngest members of the group. I hadn't even put up a fight because I was too preoccupied, but it was nerve-wracking to sit in the exact same spot that I had been sitting in during the car crash. I hadn't said anything though: I shouldn't be scared of a car, and I was sort of embarrassed about it, especially since my brothers were obviously not, and had no reason to be. Maddie was, but she was eight, and when you're eight, you're allowed to be afraid of the dark, so being afraid of the car after you've crashed in one is practically required. What had happened with the car had been entirely the thin ice's fault: we might have crashed anyway even if we _hadn't_ been going too fast. But we _had_ been going too fast, so that had added to the impact of the crash.

I'd tried to reason myself out of it on the long, awkward silence in the car. My brothers and I had so much to talk about that we had _nothing_ to talk about. We had no idea where to even begin with everything that I'd missed in the last nine years. I didn't know whether my brothers played sports, whether they had girlfriends, what exactly it was that Dad did for a living, whether William was this hateful to everyone, or if it was just a me thing. I didn't know what had happened the day I'd been kidnapped, or what school my brothers went to, and that I would proceed to go to. I didn't know what my new house looked like. I didn't even know what my brothers thought of me. Well, I had some idea of what William thought of me, but I had to assume (or hope) that it was more complicated than what it looked like: it _looked_ like my brother hated me, and would continue to hate me until the day I disappeared from his life again.

"Yeah," I murmured to Adam distractedly, wanting to avoid a fight. "I know. It doesn't usually take this long though."

I agreed with my brother, as much as I hated to admit it. It was taking us _forever_ to get back to Troy: five hours in the car, and we were only just pulling off the highway. I sighed in exasperation: we had another ten minutes to go before the car ride was over. We'd hit such bad traffic the moment we'd left the city; because of an overturned tractor-trailer that blocked all lanes for thirty minutes, than four of the five lines for forty-five minutes, and only _then_ had the police cleared away the wreckage.

"How long does it usually take from New York to Troy?" Michael asked conversationally, and I sighed, just staring out the window. I was trying as hard as I could not to concentrate on anything: the fact that the clothing I'd worn in the car crash was at my feet, in a plastic bag, or that I was wearing a really low-cut red dress that had been the only suitable thing in the entire hospital thrift shop. I didn't look half-bad in it, but it was the principal of the thing.

There were also bigger things I was worried about. My mother's death. The fact that I had to clean up all her things. My brothers' and father's sudden reappearance. The fact that I was kidnapped when I was four-years-old by the woman who had been my only caretaker for the last nine years.

I'm sure you can see the need for no concentration.

"I don't know," I murmured finally. "Maybe three, four hours." I shrugged as we began to enter the town, and I watched the stores pass by, wondering how many people knew what had happened to Mom.

I slumped down in my seat, wishing that I wasn't here. Living in Troy had never been easy for me. The bully here, Monica Wolff (ironic last name), hated my guts, and had since we'd first met back in kindergarten. And being an enemy of Monica Wolff was like having a contagious, terminal disease. No one talked to you between classes, sat with you at lunch, or worked with you in class on projects, in case Monica was watching, because than she would automatically hunt you down and kill you. Which meant she'd beat you up. Because Monica, though not an attractive girl, was a very _large_ girl and she could beat anyone except for some of the boys up.

The car turned on to my street, finally, and I sighed in relief as we pulled up in front of it. I only had to make it from the car to the house, now. With any luck, I could avoid Monica and anyone else.

"Woah." Adam said in a careful voice. "You guys really were low on money, weren't you?" I felt myself blush intensely as I looked down.

The house was very, very small. It had one story, and was white, and dark shingles, lots of which were missing. Mom and I had planted some flowers out front on my ninth birthday, and while they were a tad overgrown, they were still gorgeous, and colorful, so it looked nice enough that you didn't pass it and wonder what kind of bad luck the family that lived inside it had come upon. But Adam had a point: it was extremely modest. The green paint was just beginning to peel off the door, the lawn was quite overgrown. It was just in need of a lot of work.

"Oh my god." I whispered, feeling Mom's death as suddenly as if she'd just died moments ago. I clutched the handle of the door, staring out the window, and Adam leaned back.

"Grace?" He asked, a note of fear in his voice. I looked over him, my eyes glazed over, as if I had just seen something shocking.

"Mom." I murmured. Adam sighed, than looked back at Maddie. She looked at Adam, and shrugged a little, crossing her arms over her chest. Then he turned to Michael.

"You want to talk her out of freaking out, or shall I?" than he looked at Michael. "Shall you? Shall she?" Michael reached over and hit Adam lightly on the back of the head.

"Adam, you need to grow up." He said. "They just lost their mom. Could you be a little more sensitive?" Michael said this last part in a very low voice, but we were in the same car, so I heard it still, despite the fact he tried to hide it. "Really, Adam. Maddie's eight-years-old. I was _just_ under her age when Grace disappeared. It's scary to go through something that big when you're just young enough that no one will tell you the entire truth, what's going on." I looked at Maddie and she looked up at me and nodded once, solemnly, and I raised my eyebrows silently. She unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled onto my lap and leaned her head against my shoulder.

"I'm tired," She whispered. I forced myself to recover from my shock: Maddie needed me.

"Why don't we go change clothes, than pack up?" I suggested. "We should get out of here quickly." I looked up at the boys. "You guys want something? Most of the food is probably stale, but we've got some sodas, and chips and stuff. You can watch some TV while Maddie and I pack up our stuff."

Scott had told Maddie and me to clean up only our stuff; that he would hire some movers to take care of the rest, since Maddie and I had become less and less sure that we could take care of it ourselves. And Maddie and I intended to follow his instructions exactly, considering the fact that most of the stuff in there was really ugly furniture we'd gotten from the Salvation Army, a result of the lack of money, or stuff we'd bought at school charity things where everyone donates and then buys back the stuff they donated to pay for something new for the school. Mom and I personally thought the entire idea was stupid—you're wasting money, and it was so sparse—but I could also see how nice it was, spending all that time inside the school gym, buying back your stuff because you gave it to the charity so that the school could have a new computer lab, or science lab, or they could resurface the basketball courts, or whatever it was that needed work.

"Okay," Michael said shrugging, and opened his door easily. Adam did the same, but it took me a moment to remember to open the door. Michael opened and pulled the door back for me, and leaned against it for a moment before sighing, sympathy and sadness clearly written on his face, and stepped forward to pick up Maddie from my lap. Maddie hesitated for a moment before slipping her arms around his neck and leaning her head against his shoulder, and closed her eyes. She was asleep almost as soon as she hit his shoulder.

I smiled unsurely at him, trying to say thank you without actually using the words I seemed to have lost control of, and jumped down from Michael's black SUV, and led the way up the front walk to the door slowly. It felt like a funeral procession: we were walking slowly, heavily, tired of the life we'd been leaving recently.

I took my keys out—one of the few things that I'd been carrying during the car crash that had survived—and flipped through them, finally finding the right one before I shoved it in the locked door and twisted the doorknob.

Do you know how weird it is to come back to some place, like your house, after something has changed your life forever?

It's like…my life will never be the same. My mother is dead, my sister and I have been permanently traumatized by the sudden, unexpected, and somewhat unwelcome reappearance of our brothers and father, and the news of my kidnapping. We were going to live in the same house as them, because it was that or a foster home. And the house was still standing there, looking just as it had when Mom, Maddie and I had left to go Christmas shopping and had ended up leaving town in a helicopter, unconscious.

Michael and Adam walked past me, and I followed them in, my arms crossed tightly across my chest. While Michael and Adam took an almost instant left—the living room was right there, as you walked in the door—I kept walking, going to my mother's room. I stood in the doorway, too frightened to go in.

It had a small bed, made of dark, scratched up wood that was very well polished for something so old and ratty looking. It had an ivory comforter, and chocolate brown sheets, with cream colored pillows: gifts from Mom's parents, from when they'd died in March. They'd left a lot of stuff to us, but most of it was useless.

The dresser that matched the bed had a flat-screen TV on top of it, my mother's pride and joy, something left over from the days when I'd been younger, and less short on money. Mom loved it with all her heart, and it was sort of funny that of all the things we had in our cottage-sized house that she loved this TV best of all. But love it she did.

_It doesn't look like the room of a woman who kidnapped her daughter from her ex-husband and sons_, I couldn't keep the thought from flashing through my mind for however brief a moment, but even as it did, I felt a twinge of guilt, closely followed by anger and betrayal.

How could she do this to Maddie and me? How could she not make a plan? How could she have kidnapped me from Scott and Michael and William and Adam? How could she do that? Didn't she feel bad? Because whenever she spoke of my father, there was no burning note of regret in her voice, nor a gently made suggestion of remorse. Simple hatred had bloomed in her voice the few times she'd talked about Scott. What had he done to deserve that? Had he hurt her? Hurt me? Hurt Will, Adam, or Michael? If so, why didn't she take all her children. Or go to the police. There were so many other options. But kidnapping me? Was that really necessary?

What kind of woman did that to her children, her ex-husband, no matter how much she hated him? Words like 'idiotic', 'cruel', and 'insane' flashed through my mind, but none of those words had I ever applied to my mother. She'd been a model mother, never breaking rules, attending all school performances, all sporting events. She'd been a little eccentric at times, and she hated it when I brought up the fact that we were short on money because I wasn't supposed to know about it, and she'd been my best friend, the person I relied on to fix what other people messed up. She was my damage control.

But what was I supposed to do when my best friend, my damage control, my _mother_ became my enemy, my damager? The only title she could accurately keep was mother, and even then, only in the biological terminology.

This time, she'd destroyed a family. _Her_ family. She'd stolen nine years that her two little girls could have been sharing with their father and brothers. _She'd kidnapped a child._ I may have been her little girl, but I still wasn't hers to keep. I was my father's.

"How could you do this to me?" I whispered aloud. I moved forward numbly, opening the drawers on her dresser quickly, and glancing through them. Mom must've made a will: she couldn't have just died without leaving a plan for Maddie and I.

I left Mom's bedroom and walked down the hall, so I could go down to the basement. That was where Mom stored all the old, important things in the house. I was usually creeped out by it, but now I was on a mission, too busy to be scared of my creepy basement: I had to find the will Mom had wrote. She was a lawyer. She wasn't stupid. She wouldn't have left her daughters with no future, no idea who their father was.

What if she hadn't told Maddie and I about Scott that day? What if Maddie and I had spent five days in the hospital, than left the hospital to go into a foster home together, unaware of our relations in another state? What if Maddie and I had been _separated_, then put into foster homes? Was our father's name on our birth certificates?

At that I froze. I wheeled around, going for the older files. I tore open one of the drawers and found it filled to the brim with papers. _1989-1998_, was the title of the file, and I hesitated at first, before realizing these would have been the years that I lived with Adam, Michael, William and Scott.

"Oh my god," I murmured, brushing my fingertips along the tops of the papers, dragging my hand down the papers. My mom was a pack-rat: she'd keep papers until the end of time. Hence the four filing cabinets that stood in our basement, collecting dust with our history. With my kidnapping.

I pulled back some of the papers, and looked at each one carefully. There were a few bills, but the first thing of interest that I found was a manila folder with _Birth Certificates_ written on it. There were some perks about being the daughter of perhaps the only organization-freak pack-rat on the planet.

I carefully took the envelope out of the drawer and pulled back the metal-clip-thingys that held down the envelope flap and slipped my fingers under the dull yellow envelope flap and lifted it up. Then I quickly—so I couldn't talk myself out of it—pulled out the papers and looked at them.

The first one I saw was William's. It was a pale blue with a white boarder with _Certificate of Birth_ written across the top in the kind of font they use on college diplomas. Someone had written in neat calligraphy Will's name: William Cole Hale. Underneath that, it said our parents' names: Addison Hale and Scott Jenson Hale. It also had the date: December 12, 1989.

I shuddered a little; Will and I had the same birthday, for all that we were five years apart in age. A weird coincidence: the brother I seemed to have the least in common with shared my birthday. I flipped through the papers and looked at the second to last paper: The Certificate of Birth for Grace Elizabeth Hale. Addison Hale and Scott Jenson Hale.

So this secret—the one that I had brothers and a father—had been hiding in this house all along. In my basement. I'd been in this basement maybe a hundred times. More than that, even. And each time I'd come down here, I'd been standing right next to the secret that was destroying me right then, when it hadn't had to be a secret at all. My mother hadn't _had_ to kidnap me, hadn't had to tear my family right down the middle. But tear she had.

I took the papers and ran upstairs, then into the living room where Adam and Michael were flipping idly through the channels, looking for something good to watch when all we had were mostly the stupid public access channels. I slammed the papers down on the table and spread them out, so they could see each one clearly.

"I've lived in this house for as long as I can remember." I said angrily. "And the fact that I have brothers and the fact that I have a father…they have both been in the basement. There's an entire file downstairs on the years I lived with you guys, from the year that William was born to the year we would have left." My voice was pure acid. "There are files. Papers. How could this have happened? How did Mom and I just disappear one day in 1998?" I stared at them, and both Adam and Michael looked surprised at my outburst.

"You're gonna have to ask William." Michael said quietly. "That's his story to tell, not mine, not Adam's. It's not even really Dad's. It _was _Mom's, but now she's not really here to partake in all of this." I stared in surprise at my brother and sat down hard in the large, ratty arm chair.

"How did I just disappear?" I demanded in a soft voice. "How did no one find me? I was entered in kindergarten two years after I disappeared. Under my real name. My birth certificate is sitting right here, and at school they always have me under Grace Hale. I mean, Maddie would have thrown the police off because no one knew that Mom was pregnant, but still."

"I don't know what happened." I continued in a whisper. "And it's killing me. Please tell me, guys."

"All I can tell you is that you left December 23, 1998." Adam said. "Mom and you disappeared three days after the custody battle ended and the divorce became official." His voice twisted around the word 'divorce', as if the word was a vortex, and everything around it was being sucked into it. I felt my eyebrows jump up nearly to my forehead, surprised at the intensity of his emotions.

"How bad was the custody battle?" I murmured. "I mean, was it just bad from the kids' point of view, or was it bad from everybody's point of view?" The second I asked the question, I knew the answer: judging by Michael and Adam's faces, it was the equivalent of another World War.

"It was bad enough that the entire town, including our school, knew what was going on at home." Michael said solidly, as if this was a fact he took for granted. "God. It was pure hell. Mom lived in the house till the end of it, determined to get the house. But since Dad had bought it before she was even in the picture, he got to keep it, and Mom had to move out, even though she was completely livid about it." He shook his head. "There were shouting fights every night…and after Mom lost all custody of any of us, it was just painfully quiet." Michael watched me quietly, and pain ran over his face as he continued to watch me in silence. Even when he spoke, sadness was so strong in voice that it was hard to listen to him. "Will was your hero back then, you know?" He said softly, looking sad and mildly surprised. "You followed him everywhere. It was the sweetest thing on earth. You thought he was the coolest person in the world, and he was surprisingly nice to you, for someone with a copycat baby sister. God. He taught you everything you knew back then. And when you disappeared, he was nine. And it killed him." Adam looked at his hands, which were a little disproportionately big compared to the rest of his body, and looked back up at me. "Look, Gracie. Just go easy on him. You were on flyers in police stations, you were on the six o'clock news. Dad couldn't stop Will from seeing them. It was the hardest on William. You have to try to cut him some slack,"

"Alright…" I said softly, not sure how to respond to that. "We weren't…we weren't really _talking_ about him though…" My words were slow, unsure; while Michael's comment had been random, I wasn't sure what to make of it.

"Yeah, Mike, that was pretty weird of you." Adam said, cracking up, and Michael reached out and hit him on the head.

"Shut it, idiot." Michael said.

"You shut it," Adam said, punching him in the arm.

"Do you guys do that constantly, or is that just a here and now thing?" I asked quietly, and Adam shot me a look.

"Shush." He ordered and I smiled weakly at him, as much as I knew how to conjure up. Adam watched me for a moment before turning back to Michael. Then he frowned. "Don't I have two little sisters?" He asked the air, and I looked up, my eyes rising to the doorway. "Cuz I was sure that I had two. The other one is shorter…likes wearing braids." He was trying to make a joke, but Michael and I just shot him a look that said it all: I got up and wandered into the hallway, before lingering at the door to my sister's empty bedroom. I frowned before I turned to look at my mother's room.

Maddie was sitting in the middle of the bed cross-legged, crying softly. She was clutching one of our mother's blouses, Mom's best one, made out of intricately sewn ivory/gold silk. It had been a gift, from whom, I can't remember, but Maddie was holding it to her face and sobbing into it and I watched her for a moment, unsure of how to take care of her, how to take care of this entire thing. Should I have taken care of my sister? Or should I have just walked away, pretending not to see? I knew that _I_ would have preferred the latter—I preferred to mourn in private—but this wasn't about me. It was about Maddie.

"Maddie." I said softly, and she either ignored me or didn't hear me. I sighed and crawled onto the bed beside her, and wrapped my arms around her, and she stiffened for a moment before leaning into me.

She pressed the shirt to her face and sobbed into it, her tears staining the carefully stitched cloth. "Mommy," she sobbed, breathing in the scent of our mother. "Mommy. I want my mommy," Her voice became a little angrier. "I want Mommy!"

I remained silent as Adam and Michael came to stand in the doorway, and I looked away blushing and embarrassed.

"I can't give you Mommy." I told her softly, tears welling up in my eyes. "No one can bring back Mom." I hugged her closer, but she shoved me away and I let her push me away, so I fell back on my elbows on my bed, even though her shove had all the power of an ant's. She watched me for a heart-broken second, and then grabbed my arm and sat me up, and crawled back into my lap.

"Sorry." She whispered. I wrapped my arms around and wished my brothers weren't standing the doorway, that they hadn't been watching as tears jumped to my eyes. And for one, miserable second, I wished I didn't even have brothers or a father.

But I felt really bad just after that. _They're keeping Maddie and me from being in a foster home and separated and lord knows what else. Besides, they're my family, as much as Mom was. You can't favor your mother who kidnapped you above your brothers and father who did nothing wrong, apparently._ I wished I didn't think so…meanly about them. And part of me wished I didn't have to think about them all. I knew I needed someone to blame, one person, who I didn't have to feel guilty about being mean to. But I didn't have a single person: the story of my kidnapping was still too unclear to me for me to create a single person whom I was allowed to hate with all my being.

Maddie pulled away and glared at my brothers in the corner with a viciousness I wouldn't have thought possible for my eight-year-old sister. "Mads," I said softly, trying to sound as pleasant as possible. "Why don't you go grab your clothes from our room and put them in your backpack?" I asked her, pushing her towards the side of the bed ever so lightly. She narrowed her eyes in suspicion and grabbed my wrist.

"Come," She said softly, her voice not a whisper, but still quiet, all the same. I bit my lip for a moment, deliberating: I'd wanted to be alone with Adam and Michael, to apologize for Maddie's behavior.

"How much time do we have?" I asked them, scrubbing at my eyes as I got off the bed quickly. Adam looked half alarmed—I was guessing the tears were freaking him out—and half intensely uncomfortable.

"Well…we can head back home whenever," Michael said in a strange voice. He glanced around. "This is a seriously small room."

"Maddie and I offered her ours, but we'd never fit in here. I mean, there are two of us, and there was only one of her, and one bed hardly fits in here. Two would definitely not." I told them, and Maddie began to tug on my arm. I grudgingly followed her out of the room as she led us to her room. Michael and Adam followed. "We don't have a lot of stuff, so this really shouldn't take too long."

We walked slowly into our room, and, in a surprisingly violent motion, Maddie tore open her drawers. It clattered to the floor, and I pulled Maddie back by the back of her shirt, so it wouldn't fall on her foot and hurt her, and I thought of my mother. She would have protected Maddie that way. But had she protected me? After she'd kidnapped me, after we'd settled here, had she watched to make sure that nothing happened? I mean…something had always happened. That was just the way it worked. But had something ever not happened, because she'd pulled me back, or stopped me from taking another step?

_You're obsessing_, I reminded myself as I released Maddie. "Maddie?" I asked, and she turned her head to look up at me, if not her whole body. I looked straight at her, trying to make my point clear. "Don't do that again. Okay?" I asked her, looking at the wooden drawer sitting, out of place, on our rug. If I'd had any energy at all, I would have tried to figure out why she did that, but it was all I could do to keep standing.

"Okay." She agreed, then bent down to the floor and looked under the bed, than looked blankly up at me. "What do we put our stuff in?" She asked. I shrugged and I went to my dresser.

"Adam, Michael, I have to get dressed in clothes that actually belong to me," I said, turning to face the door. Adam was out of the room in a second, and Michael watched me for a moment before leaving, shutting the door firmly behind him. I leaned forward and twisted the lock on the door before slipping off my red dress and getting into my second pair of jeans and a t-shirt that had one of those green recycling signs on it except instead of saying _reduce, reuse, recycle_, it said _rock, paper, scissors,_ and showed the hands playing rock, paper, scissors. Then I rethought it and pulled the jeans and shirt off and slipped on a button up blouse Mom had bought me for Christmas the year before, a jean skirt, some black tight, and my black flats. I wanted to look nice.

I pulled my hair out of its ponytail and left it down before I looked at Maddie.

"I need a bag." She said, frowning, and I bent down and looked under my bed, before tugging out the duffel bag there, bought when Mom's parents had died and we'd had to fly down there. I put it on my bed and dumped some of my clothes in there.

In twenty minutes, I'd cleaned up the life I'd lived for the last nine years.

It's amazing how easy it is to destroy something, especially when it took so long to build it up.


End file.
